


Feeling Human

by HeartOfTheMirror



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Bucky Barnes & Tony Stark Friendship, Bucky Barnes's Metal Arm, Character Study, Feels, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Implied Relationships, M/M, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Past Brainwashing, Past Bucky Barnes/Natasha Romanov, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Slash, Present Tense, Recovery, literal and figurative, some intentional tense switching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-06
Updated: 2016-03-06
Packaged: 2018-05-25 00:27:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6172753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HeartOfTheMirror/pseuds/HeartOfTheMirror
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky wants to feel again. Tony is a bro. And an asshole. But mostly a bro.</p><p>A study of ambiguous relationships.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Feeling Human

**Author's Note:**

> I really wanted to write this as a character study of Bucky post-CATWS. My pre-war Bucky voice is pretty solid but I still struggle sometimes with the 21st-century canon Bucky so this was an exercise in that. I also messed around a little but with style.

“I can program it to feel pain,” says Tony, looking at the Winter Soldier seriously through the sleek headset with the Stark Glass™ that makes his brown eyes glow cobalt car crash blue. He keeps his eyes only on the dead arm while he works, locks eyes with Barnes when he asks him questions, and never stops speaking. Nothing like the flat white reflections or the bug-eyed staring from bald men in white lab coats and clockmaker goggles. Nothing like permafrost silence where permission to speak was doled out only for mission reports and field operations.

It isn’t good, but at least it’s different.

All around them there are suits, some complete and some still opened up, waiting for their turn for upgrades. It should be a horror show, a freak’s bizarre of metal men, but Tony eyes them all with loving pride that he thinks no one sees. Tony is not the Winter Soldier’s maker, but it’s comforting in some way to think he might be held in the same regard as his hollow children. As if he could be a man’s own skin and bones just hanging in a closet waiting for someone to slip inside and make him whole again.

It feels more true to who he’s been than who Steve expects him to be, quietly, in half shattered hopes and stifled 2:00 am sobs that he thinks no one can hear. Bucky is capable of so many things but he hasn’t yet found the right combination of magic words to wring the guilt and grief and pain out of Steve like dirty water from a sponge.

No one wants to disappoint Captain America. That’s why he and Tony are here despite... despite all the rest of it.

The Winter Soldier’s metal arm lies gleaming in the workbench between them, the protective outer plates extended or removed, leaving the delicate inner workings exposed to scrutiny and tinkering.

It has taken a long time to get to this point. Out on the streets Bucky was a perfect chameleon. He could flirt with his baristas and help old ladies cross the street no problem. But when the threat assessment goes up a few notches to say, the Avengers, casual physical contact becomes a form of quiet combat. A tactical assessment. A calculated vulnerability.

Barnes has always known the arm is as much a potential weakness as it is a source of strength. It goes against every instinct to allow it to be disabled. He’d feel less exposed if it was his johnson laying on the table for Tony to fiddle with. 

Their friendship- if that’s what it was, if that’s what this could be called- had only formed because Steve was so desperate to get Bucky to form relationships with actual people (“I don’t count,” Steve had said sardonically) that he wasn’t picky about who his houseguest chose (“I can’t believe I’m saying this to you Buck, but you need to go out on the town sometime. Ya know, socialize. Not with a barista, preferably.”). 

Almost six months since he and Steve shacked up in their weird platonic dance of long glances and brushing fingers. He had come in out of the cold sure, but only to the heat of Steve’s hearth. Not to S.H.E.I.L.D or any of the other agencies foaming at the mouth to acquire an asset with his skills, but to Steve who had sheltered him in his modest Brooklyn apartment and (sometimes literally) beat away anyone who showed an unrequited interest in the Winter Soldier. 

It was fortunate for the both of them that Tony burned on curiosity the way cars consumed gasoline. And it helped that any Stark could own the world as long as he had a sharp suit, failing economy and a quick camera crew. It was always going to come to this point. Where they needed someone who knew how to smack the system on the nose with a rolled up newspaper and tell it to sleep outside. And how could a Stark not want to get his hands all over advanced Hydra weaponry? There had been a time when-

No. Nope. Nope. No way. Bucky mentally wipes that slate clean for the thousandth time. Move on. In the swamp of his mind sometimes he catches a catfish and sometimes he snags his line on something determined to drag him down. He knows the difference now. Mostly. Knows how to back out of a thought slowly with his hands in the air.

His tenacity is one of the reasons why Bucky likes Tony. In a world of gods and monsters, he’s just a regular asshole kicking around in a tin can. Billionaire playboy philanthropist did him no good, not where it mattered. Bucky’d killed enough politicians and CEOs to see first hand how little that kind of power and prestige meant in the face of a bullet. His genius certainly helped but it was his tenacity, like skinny-little-shit Steve Rogers before him, that made him a hero. A regular man with the balls to go toe to toe with Captain America and his comrades. Friends. 

Steve trusts Tony but he doesn’t always particularly like him (they were both very much men of their generations), which was probably why he has so much trouble understanding why Tony was the first Avenger that Bucky started to sniff around when he crawled out of his emotional cardboard box like an abused kitten.

“Okay Morrissey,” Tony had said when the three men met up for coffee. Bucky wasn’t supposed to know the cafe had been rented out for the day and filled with ex-S.H.E.I.L.D. agents Stark Industries had deemed worthy of employment. Or maybe, he thought, he was supposed to play along and just pretend like he didn’t know since they were hardly trying at all. The man in the corner was obviously reading a dossier about the security vulnerabilities of the Japanese rail system. Amateurs.

“I gotta know, was it really you that shot Lincoln or was it that Booth fella? No judgment.” Tony turned on that targeted missile grin and raised his hands as Steve glared, doing that jaw clenching, nostril flaring face-of-righteousness-in-the-presence-of-injustice that meant the other person was in for one bitch of a lecture. It was a fight that they would never win even if they had Steve bleeding and gasping for breath on the ground. 

Barnes barked out a harsh laugh, rusty and surprised at itself. He saw Stark’s ever assessing eyes warm, dancing, like a glass of brandy held in front of an open fire. There was a fight that couldn’t be won in that brown as much as there was in Steve’s blue. The Winter Soldier knew then that they would get along, even if they hated each other. 

It was weeks more before he could be coaxed by Tony’s persistent curiosity and Steve’s mother hen worry to let Stark take a look at the inner workings (“You’ve broken six cups, two plates, and a fork since you moved in Bucky. Are you sure the arm wasn’t damaged in that last fight?” 

“I’m sure,” said the Winter Soldier, looking away from Steve and wondering how to replace the plates when he had no money- not that money was difficult to get, but Steve would have something to say about the methods by which it came. 

“Maybe you should have it looked at,” said Steve, oblivious to his friend’s train of thought, so caught up was he in his own. For Steve, anything). 

He’d agreed, clenching his jaw and his fists, hearing the joints pop in his flesh hand like circuits shorting out. Steve had pulled out the head-tilt-half-smile of pity and the Barnes resolved never to show that weakness to this man again. 

He was not so damaged that he could never again sit with a doctor or a technician comfortably. He would get over it. All the Hyrda training, testing, maintenance, and missions. It wasn’t that bad, really. Not like he was scarred for life about it. 

Objectively the War had been worse. At least with Hyrda he rarely went hungry or slept in muddy ditches. A soldier’s life was never exactly easy and lots of guys had it worse. At least he’d had a childhood, unlike the little spiders.

So some stuff kept him up at night, whatever. He’d get over it. In fact, he practically already was. He didn’t want to be the object of pity. He wanted Steve’s respect and admiration the way he’d once had on breezy Brooklyn fire escapes. So he walked in front of his fearless leader into the “toy room” at the top of Avengers Tower with his chin held up.

They both feared that he would freeze up in the doorway, flashing back to his time as the asset. He didn’t. There was no way he could mistake the cluttered modern opulence of Tony’s headquarters at the top of the tower for anything like the bleached-out industrialism of the sub-basements where he’d been dissected and engineered by Hydra. German engineering wasn’t infallible after all Bucky had thought sardonically, thinking of how many of his former masters he’d ripped apart after Steve had found him that second time.

He doesn’t blame Steve for fretting, for worrying over him. He knows he told Steve why people looking at his metal arm felt like chewing tin foil but he couldn’t really remember the conversation- huddled in a corner of their kitchen, trembling as the clock blinked 3:00 am. Steve tried to get him to drink water, then tea, and eventually even Scotch in ever more desperate attempts to prove himself useful, to fix something so far beyond his control.

He doesn’t blame Steve for leaving when Tony got down to the serious work, rock music Bucky’s never heard pounding so hard that they would’ve all had to scream over it to be heard.  
Bucky liked it, Steve didn’t. Neither of them are stupid, though. They saw that this was Tony’s way of stress testing him, seeing what was broken beyond the metal, deeper than the bone. All or nothing, immediate an unannounced, is Tony. 

The problem was that the Winter Soldier was doing well and Steve, oddly, wasn’t. When it was clear that Steve wasn’t needed he volunteered to make a coffee run to the kiosk in the lobby. Barnes had clocked twelve closer locations but he just gave his friend one of those wound up little smiles and asked for the usual. Tony had still been throwing out modifications to his triple shot whatever when Steve had slammed the door behind him. 

It was only then that he’d asked JARVIS to dial down the volume.

“Something wrong?” Barnes had asked challengingly. 

“Nothing a genius can’t fix,” Tony said flippantly. He dropped his tools, pushed his wheeled ergonomic chair back and rubbed his thighs. “Thing is, I know you just came in for a cleaning but there’s no reason why we should have to stick to the old swish and spit routine. You just want a tune up, I can do that. 

“But why stop there? I’m talking Mach II here buddy, full upgrade. This thing was made for brute force, not daily living. There’s a few things your friendly neighborhood human rights violators didn’t see fit to include in the badass metal arm package they signed you up for. Or more likely they were just too stupid to realize that they _could_.”

“What kind of things?” Bucky had asked flatly. No one was putting a fucking arc reactor in his palm. He didn’t give a shit what Stark had to say about it. He hadn’t come here to be made more dangerous. Everyday living could mean a lot of things to an Avenger, especially one so out of touch with reality as Stark.

“You’ve only been wired for pressure and balance, right? What if I said I could give you more than that? Like, a lot more.” He might be able to feel Steve’s skin again. Steve’s heat on the cotton of their sheets in the morning. The texture of a freshly laundered towel. Water running over it in the shower.

“Do it,” he said. Tony’s manic grin transformed his face. A wise man might ask about the consequences, the risks. Barnes didn’t give a shit. Anything that took him one step closer to being a real boy was worth it.

Tony opened the arm and got to work. It was odd watching his own innards be rearranged, no matter how many times Bucky had seen it before. 

“Bucky?” Steve asked from the doorway. He looked adorably flushed, as if he’d run up the stairs rather than waiting for Stark’s private elevator. 

“Are you gonna stand in my shadow all afternoon?” Bucky had asked after approximately ten minutes of enduring Steve’s pacing and fretting. 

It hadn’t taken much to convince Steve to go. Not for someone who knew him the way Bucky did. One or two comments and he was off shopping for jeans with Sam. He’d probably buy Bucky ten pairs and maybe some khaki slacks for himself if he didn’t go with Sam. Bucky loved that he knew that about Steve. He hated that Steve never thought to wonder if Bucky had an alternative motivation.

He doesn’t want to be protected. Not from Tony, and not from the reality of his situation. He remembers what happened to him, all that shit. And if he lets Steve stand there and nervously distract him, then he’s never going to come out on the other side of all of those experiences reforged. He refuses to be Broken Bucky Barnes. He’d rather be a new man entirely.

“I can program it to feel pain,” says Tony. Bucky gives him a lot of credit for even mentioning it. Most people just assume you’d never want pain. Most people would have just done it anyway, called it an unavoidable side effect and slept a little better knowing that even if the Winter Soldier wasn’t locked up at least he might be suffering.

Bucky took a minute to think it over. Tony was uncharacteristically patient. Bucky could see what it cost him to keep all that energy in. It could be a hindrance in battle, possibly, but pain had never stopped him before.

“Do it,” he said. Anything to be a real boy.

Tony nods, already absent from the human side of things. Back inside the metal. 

Bucky wonders if Tony wants to hurt him. He’s got good reasons to. And yeah, they’re friends after a fashion but things are never simple like that with Tony. Tony hurts the people he likes almost as often as he hurts the people he hates. He doesn’t mean to, but then again, neither did Bucky. They’d each had their demons spurring them on into bad decisions. So, Bucky figures, is anyone is allowed to have mixed feelings it’s this fragile purebred human.

“What about this tag?” Tony asked suddenly, tapping to cool end of his soldering gun against the star twice rapidly. Bucky shrugs, except for how his left side is all dead and numb. It doesn’t feel right, just slanting one shoulder.

“So you don’t want me to engrave “V.L. +J.B.B. 4 Eva” underneath?” Tony asked. 

“No,” Bucky said. “I only ever met Stalin anyway.” Tony quirked a wry smile and got back to work. 

“Scrap the star or keep it?” he asked.

“Scrap,” Bucky said absently, wondering if he could get Tony to engrave “Property of S.G.R.” instead. No truer thing had ever been spoken. Not that anyone would understand. He and Steve were component parts. Functions of each other. Entangled particles. When one freezes, so does the other.

“I think you made the right choice you know,” Tony says several minutes of silence later.

“How do you figure?” Bucky asks, slipping back into his old Brooklyn drawl the way he does sometimes without really understanding why.

Tony gives the impression of shrugging while keeping his hands absolutely steady. “If you can’t feel the pain,” Tony says, “how can you know if it’s healing?”

Bucky hummed thoughtfully. He should stop being surprised by this guy, he thought. There was something of the artist buried deep, deep inside of Tony where even the arc reaction couldn’t shed any light on it. It was in the way he arranged things just so. His sense of showmanship, of style. The way he needed things to balance. 

What would have happened to the world, Bucky wondered, if Tony had gone to pastry school instead of MIT? What if he’d fallen passionately in love with the art of museum curation? Or devoted himself to dance?

But no, his art was all metal and light. No random wayward dreams would have been encouraged in the Stark prodigy, of that Bucky was sure. Howard had been a good man during the war. But if anyone knew how war could change a man. . . 

But anyway, that was all beside the point.

Steve didn’t like that Tony was helping to reshape Bucky into a new image of himself but there were no other options for tech and as for a social life, well, they’d gone through the entire list.  


Steve thought Natasha would be a better friend for Bucky at first. And the two black-clad former assassins did have a lot in common. And she was beautiful in so many ways. Sleek, difficult to track Natalia whose shoulders and hips moved with the grace and power of a lioness, her feet padding as silently as any cat. Together, any fool might mistake them for a matching pair (Steve’s always been a fool).  
She who understood the gentle hand of the Red Room and what it took to crawl out from under the concrete fuck-ton of those memories and form something that looked roughly like a normal life in the aftermath. 

One of the many things Bucky hadn’t gotten around to telling Steve was who trained Natalia when she’d been a proud girl who insisted on being addressed by her proper name. Who was first given the barbed wire clay of her mind to shape. 

Who, after the frozen blink of over a decade and a great deal of forgetting, made love to her for the first time while they were on a mission in the UK hiding out from a downpour in a shitty hostel. Those memories had evaporated like raindrops on a hot pan days later. Now he isn’t sure if she had ever remembered, or if it had never happened, and the whole thing was one of the implants they tried to use to control him.

Runner up on Steve’s list of “Better People For Bucky to Befriend” would probably have been Clint but that was right out for obvious reasons. Maybe the others didn’t know but Bucky was pretty sure he’d seen the Black Widow in love once before. He wasn’t about to go anywhere near either one of them. Not when Clint would always look at him and see one of the scalpels that had carved the baby fat off her.

Then Bruce, who understood what it meant to lose control, to hurt people he never wanted to hurt, to destroy and rampage and be left empty and shaking after all of that. Divided into two separate beings in one body, the way Steve imaged Bucky Barnes and the Winter Soldier were divided. As if there was some hard line between what Bucky had been willing to do for Steve and Dernier, and Dum Dum, and Morita and the things he’d done under Hydra’s command because he thought he was a good man doing honest work. 

There isn’t.

He was the man who had lived through all those things, done all those things, cuddling Steve close in Brooklyn winters and listening to his chest rattle with pneumonia, and shooting an entire family point blank one summer in Bucharest. He had been told that their deaths would save hundreds of people. The youngest, a boy, was fifteen. 

It was all variations on the theme. The same man, broken and reassembled. Disassembled and rebroken. All the same pieces in a different order each time he breathed and blinked and woke anew. Steve could never know this so the Winter Soldier said nothing, let himself be washed clean in Steve’s presence. Pretended those days of leather and gun oil were all a blur. Let himself fall into old habits that he hadn’t even known were old habits until he breathed Steve’s air. Bucky never tried to pretend he was the same but he absolutely led Steve to believe he was a good man.

But this is now and now Tony is connecting loose wires, cleaning out the pipes, whatever. 

Tony has Jarvis text Steve a wholesome inspirational quote every day just to be an asshole. Bucky often wondered who picked them out. Tony? Jarvis? Was there a queue? 

A few days ago one had come while Steve was in the middle of one of his usual morning hugs where he tried to superglue Bucky together with the force of his raw determination and overwhelming love. Instead of letting go Steve had just propped his chin on Bucky’s shoulder and read the text over it. 

“Find a place inside where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain,” Steve read aloud. “John Campbell said that. I guess it sounds kind of nice but it doesn’t seem very practical,” Steve murmured against Bucky’s ear. 

Bucky wanted to answer him tit for tat.

“It’s so hard to forget pain,” Bucky says to Tony now as he hadn’t had the heart to do when he was in Steve’s gentle idealistic arms. “But it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”

“Jarvis?” Tony called off-handedly. 

“It’s a quote from Diary by Chuck Palahniuk, Sir,” Jarvis replied promptly.

“That’s cheating,” Bucky sulked grumpily. 

He and Steve had heard so many “And the second rule of… is don’t talk about …” references that Fight Club had got bumped up on the “Catch Up to Modern Times” list a couple weeks ago. Steve only made it about halfway through the movie before he got very angry and left the couch to bang pots around in the kitchen on the pretense of washing dishes.

Buck’d loved it. Steve was too much of a gentleman to rant about it while his friend was still watching but the second he turned off the tv the stream of righteous fury began. Bucky tried to redeem the film in Steve’s eyes by telling him about how the banks had been exploded in the end, the debt erased. All those people, free. Imagine if we’d had that in the Depression?

But it was just one of those things where they couldn’t agree so they left it at that. Bucky’d read the book version because of course he did. And then he’d gone to Barnes and Noble and bought another three by the same guy.

Diary hadn’t been his favorite but he’d still creased a few pages.

“It’s complete bullshit anyway,” Tony says. “What you learn from peace is how not to be a miserable self-loathing prick.”

“Because you have so much experience with that,” Bucky said.

“Point,” Tony allowed. “But at least I’m willing to nut up and keep trying.”

Bucky was silent. Tony knew they’d come to a draw so they both put the conversation away and moved on. Conversations with Tony were pretty easy for Bucky. It all boiled down to deciding when to tune him out and when to egg him on. Tony doesn’t talk much while he works, Bucky realizes. It’s easy to zone out and just let things happen to his body when he doesn’t have to constantly filter through Tony’s words for directions or stupid bullshit.

“All done!” Tony announced hours after the sun had sunk below the horizon. Bucky had no idea how long he’d been sitting there. He hadn’t been sleeping but neither had he been awake. “The nurse will give you a lollipop on your way out,” Tony snarked, running a towel briskly over the greasy plates of Bucky’s metal arm like it was the hood of a car.

He couldn’t believe it was done.

Tony just “had some parts lying around” that mysteriously been exactly what he needed to do all the basic upgrades on the arm. The star was gone. It was fitting because his first memory of it was waking up to find it there and wondering when that had happened.

It feels just like the other one whereas before the difference was apparent with the slightest thought. He clasped them together in a feedback loop. It was so strange, like hearing his own voice in a recording. 

He scraped his fingernails across the slick metal of his forearm and he felt… not quite pain, but a bright warning that pain was going to come it he kept at it. He let out a long breath. 

It was like being unwound a little bit, feeling human.

**Author's Note:**

> I really hope you liked it!
> 
> Kudos and comments are very much appreciated! :D Please?
> 
>  
> 
> And as always, you can find me at my [my tumblr](http://heartofthemirror.tumblr.com/) for more of the same.


End file.
